Homesteader Mary Ellen “Mollie” Hall Warren Klapp (1862-1933)
Eighty-million acres of public land in the West went into private ownership by 1900 through the 1862 Homestead Act. New Mexico drew hundreds of settlers who built homes and farmed 160-acre allotments in pursuit of a better life. Mollie Klapp was one. Born in Illinois, by 1900 she was widowed in Oklahoma with seven children when she decided to move to Moriarty, a “pinto bean capital of the world.” The Estancia Valley is well-suited to dryland farming and helped New Mexico become the nation’s fourth largest pinto bean producer by 1916 when 2.5 million pounds were harvested. Mollie farmed, taught school, and remarried. Her hard life led to institutionalization at the state mental health hospital in Las Vegas where she worked as a seamstress and housekeeper, and died from “exhaustion.”.